THIS JULY, I’ll have been swimming for half of my life. In January, I was not so sure that I would have the opportunity to boast about that fact.

Starting this season, Carondelet High School decided to make swimming and track and field, previously no-cut sports, sports that now require tryouts. I work hard, show up for meets, and endure the early-morning practices in the rain, but that would make no difference.

The qualification devised by the coaching staff is an effortless one for most swimmers, but it is also one that involves my least successful race — swimming a 37-second, 50-yard freestyle race. This two-lapper is far from painful and easy to succeed in for most people. I have never felt fast in that race, however, and enjoy swimming others much more.

Swimming is always fun for me. I love being in the water and being on a team. So at first, the prospect of tryouts did not faze me. I knew that I could make the cut. What I didn’t realize at the time is that such results typically come for me after several months of training. My sporadic self-coached swim workouts began to seem less and less credible. I started to worry.

My mind raced to the worst-case scenario: me being a lazy bum who could no longer call herself a swimmer. Over-dramatic, right? But as I said, I love to swim.

Talking to other swimmers did not help my anxiety. I started to wonder why on earth the athletic department ordered cuts from the two largest, yet also greatly successful, sports teams at Carondelet. A newsletter later explained that the desire came from a new requirement for safety, which involves fewer athletes at meets and practices.

No one is more annoyed than I am by those who are technically on the swim team yet exert a minimal effort. When I reminded myself of this, my frustration with the tryouts themselves dissolved. With more demanding requirements for making the team come stricter rules for how to stay on the team.

I tried a lot of things to speed up. I memorized precisely the same amount of seconds from the song “Footloose” as I needed to swim the race in, so that during the race I could sing it in my head and know when I needed to be close to the wall because time was up. I had low expectations for that theory, seeing as it originated from a dream that my mom had, but figured that I would give it a shot.

Then I tried walking to the gym instead of being driven there, which allowed me to build up the lost muscles in my legs. It also had the added bonus of not forcing my brain to sort through Kenny Loggins’ lyrics, which I still don’t seem to be able to fully understand.

On the first day of the new season, nerves were racing up and down my legs and arms, making me jumpy and anxious. I did not even know how the tryouts would be set up. A million questions popped up in my mind. My biggest worry was that we would need to get in the water and swim our qualifying race then and there. Momentary relief came when the coaches explained that everyone would have Monday and Tuesday to swim a normal workout. Come Wednesday, people could get out of practice and go to the end of the pool to swim their races, but it needed to be done by the end of the week. I decided to give all three racing days a shot, figuring that I could improve my odds while seeing how much work needed to be done. On Wednesday, I swam the race in 38 seconds, one second away from the required time. Although it sounds like a loss, it was faster than I had expected to swim that day, between cold weather, stress, and its being my first real race since last August.

I knew that if I could only get off the walls faster or kick a little harder the next two days, I would make the team. When I arrived at the pool on Thursday, I found out that that day was do or die; Friday’s swim practice had been canceled.

I tried to arrange it so that I would swim against someone who is relatively faster than me, so that I could push myself to catch up with her, yet not too much faster, so that I did not lose hope. Every mistake I made during the race added to my mental tally of how much more I needed to push myself the rest of the way in order to be a Cougar. I kicked so hard that my breathing pattern was shot, and I ended up taking so many breaths that I had a flashback to my races from when I was 8 years old.

Nonetheless, it felt like a solid, winning race. As I grasped the diving block to drag myself out of the pool, I both desired and refused to know what my time was. Devastation swept through me when I discovered that I barely missed the mark, swimming the race in 37.7 seconds. I asked the coach whether I could swim it again for a faster time, but she said that it was fine, because I had at least been improving my times. This remark was the first hint that I had that maybe things would work out.

A week later, I miraculously found my name as part of a group taped on the window of the athletic director’s office. I was officially a Carondelet swimmer once again, despite not having made the time. It means more to me to be on the swim team this year, because I feel that I earned it. But it was a much bigger mess to get through than just showing up at the pool.

The Times’ Life in Perspective board is made up of local high school journalists who write stories, opinion columns and reviews for TimeOut. Alexandra Rudolf is a sophomore at Carondelet High School. She can be reached c/o lip@cctimes.com.

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